Most
of us have heard that song. It’s from “The Music Man.”
It’s a famous song, and it made the city famous. How many American
cities are the subjects of a famous song?

But
Gary, Indiana, for all practical purposes, is no more.

There
are still some 80,000 people living there, according to the 2010 census—a
decrease of almost 17% from the 2000 census. In 1960 Gary had a population
of over 178,000; so today’s population figure represents a decrease
of about 55%.

To get
a better feel for what those numbers mean, you have to see the pictures.
You can take an online tour of Gary, Indiana, on the “Forbidden
Places” website.

Yes,
the pictures tell the story. Schools, hospitals, the Methodist Church;
post offices, factories, office buildings, and the Jackson Five Theater—all
abandoned, all quietly rotting away. Broken windows, floors covered with
debris, and peeling ceilings. Tons and tons of equipment, furniture, and
accessories: desks, hospital beds, wheelchairs, file cabinets, electrical
fixtures. And outside, mile after mile of empty streets—no cars,
no pedestrians. When 80,000 people inhabit a city that once, and not so
long ago, housed 178,000, it leaves a lot of unused space. One is reminded
of Isaiah’s prophetic vision of the ruins of Babylon:

“It
shall never be inhabited… But wild beasts of the desert shall lie
there, and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall
dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there.” (Isaiah 13:20-21)

Consider
the waste. That furniture and equipment were not decayed and useless when
first they were abandoned. Much of it must have been left behind in satisfactory
working order. And we see vast quantities of iron and steel left behind
to rust, and tons of beautiful building stone.

Why
was none of it salvaged? Once upon a time, Japan built a modern navy out
of scrap metal. And if you’ve ever had to rent a hospital bed for
home care, you know it’s a costly proposition. You’d think
some of those hundreds or thousands of beds might have been sold, or donated.
But no—it’s all been left behind to rust and rot.

Consider
the labor that went into building this city, the dreams, the hope, the
sacrifice, the sweat, the tears, the joy: and all that, too, has gone
to waste.

But
then one gets to thinking, “How much more of America is going to
look like this, before our leaders are finished with it?” In “America
the Beautiful” we sing the line, “Thine alabaster cities gleam.”
How many of our cities have stopped gleaming, since those words were written?
Have you looked at any pictures of Detroit lately?

“How
doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become
as a widow! She that was great among the nations, and princess among the
provinces, how is she become tributary!” (Lamentations 1:1)

We’ve
got the “smart growth,” save-the-planet crowd, who wants to
“build down” Western civilization. In 2009, British Prime
Minister Gordon Brown’s “green advisers” told him Britain
had to get rid of 32 million Britons—somehow! They didn’t
say how: only that the UK had better cut its population from 62 million
to 30 million, or else Britain wouldn’t be “sustainable.”

Whenever
you hear a statist use the word “sustainable,” watch out.

Gary,
Indiana, came into being as a steel town. It died because America’s
steel production industry was permitted to die. Gary didn’t die
because a plague hit it, because the Assyrians razed it to the ground,
or because a flood erased it. Gary died because our leaders of politics
and industry decided America didn’t need to make steel anymore.

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It was,
perhaps, a case of involuntary manslaughter. Maybe Detroit is negligent
homicide. But the next generation of ravaged, rotting cities appears to
be on the short list for premeditated murder.

Murder
by whom?

By the
freedom-eaters—the Agenda 21, Man-Made Global Warming mob; George
Soros, Maurice Strong, and their robot in the White House; by the country
club Republicans who let the Democrats take the blame but are very much
along for the ride; by Planned Non-Parenthood, the “Human Rights”
Campaign, and the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement; by the whole devouring
locust-swarm of statist zealots who will do what’s best for us even
if they have to kill us: the whole Godless crowd of freedom-eaters.

Lee Duigon,
a contributing editor with the Chalcedon Foundation, is a former newspaper
reporter and editor, small businessman, teacher, and horror novelist.
He has been married to his wife, Patricia, for 34 years. See his new
fantasy/adventure novels, Bell Mountain and The Cellar Beneath the Cellar,
available on www.amazon.com

Gary, Indiana, came
into being as a steel town. It died because America’s steel production
industry was permitted to die. Gary didn’t die because a plague
hit it, because the Assyrians razed it to the ground, or because a flood
erased it. Gary died because our leaders of politics and industry decided
America didn’t need to make steel anymore.